From owner-freebsd-hackers Fri Jun 23 5:21:49 2000 Delivered-To: freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org Received: from hermes.research.kpn.com (hermes.research.kpn.com [139.63.192.8]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 902AD37B5A8 for ; Fri, 23 Jun 2000 05:21:43 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from K.J.Koster@kpn.com) Received: from l04.research.kpn.com (l04.research.kpn.com [139.63.192.204]) by research.kpn.com (PMDF V5.2-31 #42699) with ESMTP id <01JQY1OHYZ9M0006YT@research.kpn.com> for freebsd-hackers@freebsd.org; Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:21:41 +0200 Received: by l04.research.kpn.com with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:21:40 +0100 Content-return: allowed Date: Fri, 23 Jun 2000 14:21:38 +0100 From: "Koster, K.J." Subject: Cooperative site-sitting To: 'FreeBSD Hackers mailing list' Message-id: <59063B5B4D98D311BC0D0001FA7E4522026D76A2@l04.research.kpn.com> MIME-version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: owner-freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Dear FreeBSD Hackers, I've been walking around with a wild idea again. I'm worried that this mail is going to be a bit of a long rant. Sorry in advance. I've been looking at those sites that can monitor the availability and performance of your web site. For a few bucks per URL, you can receive a monthly e-mail about how much your site has been visible across the 'net. Someone wrote a HTML/cgi wrapper around ping and traceroute and is making good money on that. Good for them of course. The better ones will have pingservers at strategic locations on the 'net, so they can even tell you in more detail why your site was not reachable. The clever ones don't actually have much hardware, but pay you a few bucks if you run their ping server daemon, that watches other sites. Anyway, we have many bigger and smaller web admins on this mailing list. Perhaps some of us could engage in a joint effort to watch eachother's sites, instead of having others make money off all of us. If my site goes down, you send me an e-mail, or a fax or a page or whatever, and if yours goes down, I do you the same favour. No money involved. You'd team up with three or four web masters in different time zones, so that you have 24-hour human-assisted coverage. You exchange phone/fax/page numbers and agree to be friends even if someone screws up. After a while, when you're comfortable with your new-found web-pals, you may even give them ssh access to a rebootaccount. This may save you a wakeup call to frob that big red knob. For bigger companies, this is a bad idea, because they are already doing their own monitoring. *cough* Home users don't participate because they have a life. :-) Ideal candidates are for example schools and smaller, pressed-for-cash companies or non-profit organisations. Companies that have a sysop for eight hours a day, but none during off-hours. Places where webmasters come in in the morning to discover whether their site is up or down. Just a thought. I will go back to work now. :-) Kees Jan ================================================= TV is the worst of both worlds. It's not as good at words as radio is because the pictures are a distraction which demand attention, and it's not as good as cinema because the pictures are not nearly as good. [Douglas Adams] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message